A big element of the so-called “American Dream” is this idea of lifting yourself up, that anyone can succeed with hard work. That the United States is the land of opportunity, a class-free society. There may have been, for some people, just such opportunities. Many of us can look at friends or family and see people who moved upwards in social station, both economically and socially. As Ezra Klein points out, those opportunities are being foreclosed for more and more people:
The Center for American Progress just released a comprehensive study of economic mobility and income volatility. And, according to its data, Andy’s right about the American lack of fatalism, the belief in opportunity and mobility. When asked if people get rewarded for their effort, 61 percent of Americans agreed, versus 49 percent of Canadians, 33 percent of the British, and 23 percent of the French (weirdly, the Philippines win this one, with 63 percent agreeing). But of all these societies (save the Philippines), America is one of the least mobile, which is to say the least dependent on hard work rather than social station. In Denmark, the relationship between your parent’s income and yours is 15% percent or so. In Canada, it’s 19% percent. In France, it’s 41 percent. And in America, it’s 47 percent. The only country more hidebound and hierarchal is Andy’s native England (50 percent), also the country most closely approximating the American economic model.
The American model.
Just what has that model become? It’s certainly NOT one that rewards hard work, but rather one that rewards capital, and ONLY capital. Perhaps it never came close to what it once promised to be, especially for minority members of our society, but the crony capitalism that we all labor under now has locked this country into a harsh and unforgiving feudalism. In many ways, an institutionalized form of indentured servitude has been established for entire populations of people. The contracts now aren’t labor in return for room and board, or in return for training for a trade. Instead of signing away freedom for a short amount of time in return for passage, today one signs contracts for credit: credit for a home, credit for education, credit for for the proper clothes and accessories to be presentable for work. Credit for a vehicle to get you to the job, a job that serves mainly to feed those lines of credit that were necessary to get the job in the first place.
Bootstraps have been replaced by invisible chains, chains locked in place by signatures on a line marked by an X. Thanks to a political class that serves only owners, not workers, breaking free of those chains has become much harder, while obligations that are supposed to flow down to workers, like healthcare and pensions, are increasingly being abandoned by the corporations. Unlike the contracts that old indentured servants labored under, today’s workers have no end date in sight. There is no contract with an employer, because the contracts have been threaded into the warp and woof of everyday life.
Have a problem with your credit? Well, obviously the problem is with YOU. YOU didn’t restrain yourself, or weren’t disciplined enough, or didn’t network effectively. Here, buy some books that will teach you how to fix yourself. It’s not the system, it’s not that over-priced college degree or anything else that YOU chose to buy with credit, the problem is you. Workers are the problem. Always the problem, and interlocking institutions work in concert to reinforce this message. WE all work together to reinforce this message. It’s a strange and insidious thing that has grown up over time, and now those who benefit from it are buying and selling political access to ensure that it never changes.
What of those who don’t or can’t get on the treadmill, those who’re too poor, or too uneducated thanks to our eviscerated schools, or too dark for our still racist nation to welcome into even this fold? They are left to labor in less essential jobs, still out in the fields and held out as an internal threat, used to frighten middle class workers with stories of crime or threats of a bottom waiting to swallow them up.
In short, most of us are left to fend for ourselves.
The only way out is to help keep the system in place. If you want to climb the ladder, you need to be either preternaturally disciplined, magically lucky or (and this is how it is usually done) you must not look too closely at what you’re doing and step over any and all in your path.
As we have done increasingly over the course of our history, Americans (and our British cousins) have become evangelical about spreading our cold, harsh and selfish system throughout the world. William Pfaff writes in the International Herald Tribune (tip of the hat to Jerome a Paris for the link):
Advocates of the new model capitalism, and the globalization project that goes with it, like to present it as an expression of historical necessity, rooted in classical economics and embodying irrefutable laws. It is progress itself, they say. Those who do not conform to the rules of modern market capitalism, and do not offer the human sacrifices of lost employment and diminished living standards that the market demands, will fall by the wayside of history.
This is simply untrue, although most of those who say it undoubtedly believe it.
The new American and British market capitalist model, which dictated deregulation of industry and privatization of state enterprises in the 1970s, and globalization of international markets in the 1990s, exists as a result of free political decisions and ideological choices that were anything but inevitable. History may one day describe them as having been perverse and socially destructive.
Two of the most important influences on the new capitalism were academic in origin, and the third, improbably, was an instance of romanticized egoism.
As we saw recently in France, and in the spreading leftist movements in Latin America, more and more people are seeing that our economic system is a political choice. Unlike the propaganda offered by our business media and corporate flacks, it isn’t a natural system, inevitable as the tides and the phases of the moon. Pfaff continues:
This is what underlay the transformation of American corporate culture, and of the American business corporation from an institution with national identity, constrained to reconcile interests of owners, employees and community, into the modern global corporation, effectively controlled by its managers and mandated to the single objective of producing “value” for stockholders, while handsomely rewarded its executives.
This change transformed labor into an anonymous commodity and put both blue-collar and white-collar staff into competition with an effectively unlimited global labor supply, resulting in employment insecurity, reduced or static wages, diminished or eliminated benefits and pensions, and the destructive social pressures of falling living standards.
In the United States, the new model of corporate business has evolved toward a form of crony capitalism, in which business and government interests are often corruptly intermingled, the system resistant to reform because of the financial dependence of both major political parties on contributed money.
Frequently described by its supporters as a progressive step in the development of a new international economy, the political-economic system that has evolved in the United States has proved regressive in crucial respects, as well as inefficient and abusive of the public interest.
Many workers KNOW that the current setup isn’t working for them and their families. No matter how often it’s banged over our heads that the economy is growing and creating jobs, more and more of us see no signs of it in our daily lives. Instead, we feel our wages stagnating (as Klein links to here) and our opportunities contracting. Given our collective lack of historical awareness, many of us don’t even realize that this iteration of capitalism isn’t even more than a few decades old. It’s not set in stone, it’s not a byproduct of some natural law. We can choose to change it.
Or we can keep on as we are, living with a system that, as Klein finishes his piece:
Americans may believe that hard work ends up offering great rewards, but the data shows that that’s simply not the case. Remember that next time you hear some conservative flack — maybe one named Tony Snow? — trumpeting the economy’s underreported strength. Why should folks appreciate a musclebound economy if it’s using those biceps to pummel the working class?
Both political parties serve this system. Both thrive on our continued servitude to capital and credit. One can realize this without calling for the end of private property. We can choose to order our system in a more equitable manner. We can put the needs of people wishing for better lives ahead of those of artificial corporate legal “persons” that exist only to exist and to grow. Look to the streets this coming Monday to see fellow human beings fighting for a more equitable system. They’re fighting not only for themselves, but for all of us.